Hypomnemata (Ὑπομνήματα)

A website like this is not uncommon. In fact, I drew my inspiration from many other websites (like this, this, and this) that are similar to this one. This trend has a name: digital gardening; and such websites—those containing incomplete, ever-evolving notes linked together with a neat graph visualizing the landscape of thought—are usually assigned the name digital garden. If you’re curious, Maggie goes into more detail about digital gardening and its history in this essay. Here, however, I am going to talk about my choice of this arcane Greek name instead of the plain old Digital Garden.

This was the first digital garden I ever saw, around a year ago. I was immediately compelled to cultivate one for myself. I was lazy, though, and utterly ignorant of the tools required to get started. I was, after all, a bad computer science student. Every few months, on some sudden and fleeting impulse, I would struggle for a while to figure out how to begin, only for the impulse to subside again for lack of a sufficiently strong motivating factor. Indeed, there were more reasons to be discouraged than motivated: I didn’t have enough notes to visualize prettily; I feared I would struggle to be earnest and thus seem performative (God forbid); and, most importantly, it was simply too damn hard to write something that wasn’t perfect immediately. Aesthetics, alone, then, was not enough. I needed a better purpose.

When one is a classics enthusiast, the genre of correspondence does not easily escape one’s notice, nor, once discovered, fail to earn one’s admiration. One who reads Seneca wishes to have someone to exchange letters with. Yet such tempora lapsa sunt, one thinks; one swallows the bile summoned forth by resentment directed towards the age of the internet and replacement of letters with instant messaging, reads a few more of his letters with envy for Lucilius, blessed with such benign an advisor, and finally wonders what Lucilius wrote back. One goes rifling through the internet in search of those replies and, finding none, suddenly realizes that Lucilius’ replies may never have existed at all. “Lucilius” is very likely just the diminutive of Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

I realized, then, that Seneca was writing for himself. All the advice, admonition, consolation, and exhortation ostensibly directed towards Lucilius were in truth directed towards himself. When one writes, one reads what one has written, and in doing so arms oneself with one’s own words. One makes oneself more and more capable by seriously engaging with things seen and heard through their transcription into writing. As Seneca himself says:

Nec scribere tantum nec tantum legere debemus: altera res contristabit vires et exhauriet (de stilo dico), altera solvet ac diluet. Invicem hoc et illo commeandum est et alterum altero temperandum, ut quidquid lectione collectum est stilus redigat in corpus. Apes, ut aiunt, debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores ad mel faciendum idoneos carpunt, deinde quidquid attulere disponunt ac per favos digerunt et, ut Vergilius noster ait,

’liquentia mella
stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas.’

—Seneca

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We ought neither only to write nor only to read: the one activity will depress and exhaust our powers (I mean writing), the other will loosen and dilute them. We must move back and forth between the two and temper each by means of the other, so that whatever has been gathered from reading may be worked by writing into a unified whole.

We should imitate the bees, as they say, which roam about and gather flowers suitable for making honey; then they arrange whatever they have brought back and distribute it among the honeycombs and, as our Vergil says,

’they pack the flowing honey
and swell the cells with sweet nectar.’

—Seneca

And similarly:

Ἔστω δὲ καὶ αὕτη πρὸς ἀσφάλειαν τοῦ μὴ ἁμαρτάνειν παρατήρησις· Ἕκαστος τὰς πράξεις καὶ τὰ κινήματα τῆς ψυχῆς, ὡς μέλλοντες ἀλλήλοις ἀπαγγέλλειν, σημειώμεθα καὶ γράφωμεν· καὶ θαῤῥεῖτε, ὅτι, πάντως αἰσχυνόμενοι γνωσθῆναι, παυσόμεθα τοῦ ἁμαρτάνειν, καὶ ὅλως τοῦ ἐνθυμεῖσθαί τι φαῦλον. Τίς γὰρ ἁμαρτάνων θέλει βλέπεσθαι; ἢ τίς ἁμαρτήσας, οὐ μᾶλλον ψεύδεται, λανθάνειν θέλων;

—Αθανάσιος Αλεξανδρείας

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Let this too be an observance for safeguarding ourselves from sinning: let each of us note down and write our actions and the movements of our soul as though we were going to report them to one another. And be assured that, since we would certainly feel shame at being found out, we shall cease from sinning, and indeed even from entertaining any base thought at all. For who, while sinning, wishes to be seen? Or who, after committing a sin, does not rather lie, wishing to escape notice?

—Athanasius of Alexandria

The idea is simple. Writing is a way of having an earnest conversation with oneself; a means of constraining one’s vices and allowing virtue to flourish. And just like that, I found a purpose.

That was rather a long digression, but an important one. I was speaking of the choice of the name. Despite having been a student of computer science, I have a deep dissatisfaction with the way technology has evolved over time. And as Maggie notes in her essay, digital gardening and technopastoralism emerged as a response to this widespread dissatisfaction among the technically inclined in the wake of death of the wild, “hodge-podge” personalization that characterized the early web. People stopped designing their own digital spaces and started filling in form fields. The blog became a vehicle for the Personal Brand™.

Maggie’s six patterns of digital gardening (topography over timelines, continuous growth, imperfection as a feature, playful personalization, content diversity, and independent ownership) describe the ethos of reclaiming that earlier spirit: exploratory, nonlinear, and resistant to the stream. This is the counterweight to the feed, to the algorithmically filtered ephemeral stream that surfaces only the Zeitgeist of the last twenty-four hours.

I align with this philosophy, but something about what I am doing here carries a subtle philosophical difference. The digital garden, as a genre, is primarily about curating and accumulating personal knowledge; it is, in Maggie’s framing, imperfect by design, a learning in public practice freed from the pressure of performative completeness. That is well and good. But I am not doing this merely to build a second brain or to share my messy learning with the internet. I am approaching it as a moral exercise.

Though this project is intimately personal, it should not be mistaken for an intimate journal or a set of confessions in the manner of Augustine of Hippo. I would not do that publicly on the internet. What this resembles lies somewhere between Aulus Gellius and Seneca. This is what Michel Foucault calls Hypomnemata (Ὑπομνήματα): a means of recording fragmentary logos (λόγος), transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, for the purpose of establishing an accomplished relationship of oneself with oneself.

And thus I defend the name I have chosen for this genre—if genre it may even be called—of this website. It is definitely not a compensatory use of Greek jargon in reaction to my disdain for all technical jargon ;)